# Functional ultrasound imaging during cognitive tasks in freely moving rodents

> **NIH NIH R21** · PRINCETON UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $212,000

## Abstract

Project Summary:
Understanding the mechanistic underpinnings of cognition is highly dependent on technologies that allow
monitoring brain activity in behaving animals. The recent progress in functional ultrasonic imaging (fUSi)
provides this ability by enabling imaging both cortical and subcortical brain structures simultaneously in freely
moving animals. The long term goal of this line of research is to unravel the brain wide networks underlying
cognitive tasks such as decision making and working memory. This lab has succeeded in training rats on
sophisticated cognitive tasks with a special focus on evidence accumulation. Moreover, work from this lab has
focused on studying one brain area at a time during evidence accumulation finding that frontal orbital field
(FOF), posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and dorsal striatum are part of an integration circuit. The remaining nodes
of this circuit are largely unknown and how activity is flowing from one brain area to another, in the context of
evidence accumulation, remains to be elucidated. The proposed experiments will study the contribution of
cortical and sub-cortical areas in the evidence accumulation process and pave the way for obtaining a circuit
diagram for the neural mechanisms underlying this behavior. The overall objective of this project is to advance
functional ultrasound imaging (fUSi) technology to measure cortical and subcortical brain activity during
cognitive tasks and apply it to an evidence accumulation task as a test case. In the evidence accumulation
context, fUSi will help us understand how decision related information is routed in the brain and which specific
brains areas are involved in multiple aspects of the task. The contribution is significant because it will resolve
several important questions about the flow of information across time and space in the brain during decision
making. The approach is innovative because this laboratory has advanced tools that allow imaging both cortical and
subcortical brain areas in a freely moving animal preforming cognitive tasks. The work proposed in this application
will therefore advance our knowledge of how the encoding of information and interactions among brain regions
lead to cognition with a special emphasis on decision making. In the long run, we expect this research to produce
mechanistic models of cognition.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9877499
- **Project number:** 1R21MH121889-01
- **Recipient organization:** PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Carlos D Brody
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $212,000
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2019-12-13 → 2021-10-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9877499

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9877499, Functional ultrasound imaging during cognitive tasks in freely moving rodents (1R21MH121889-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-14 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9877499. Licensed CC0.

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